Thursday Poem - Aunt Leaf

Needing one, I invented her—
the great-great-aunt dark as hickory
called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting-Cloud
or The-Beauty-of-the-Night.

Dear aunt, I'd call into the leaves,
and she'd rise up, like an old log in a pool,
and whisper in a language only the two of us knew
the word that meant follow,

and we'd travel
cheerful as birds
out of the dusty town and into the trees
where she would change us both into something quicker—
two foxes with black feet,
two snakes green as ribbons,
two shimmering fish—and all day we'd travel.

At day's end she'd leave me back at my own door
with the rest of my family,
who were kind, but solid as wood
and rarely wandered. While she,
old twist of feathers and birch bark,
would walk in circles wide as rain and then
float back

scattering the rags of twilight
on fluttering moth wings;

or she'd slouch from the barn like a gray opossum;

or she'd hang in the milky moonlight
burning like a medallion,

this bone dream, this friend I had to have,
this old woman made out of leaves.

Mary Oliver, from Twelve Moons

Wordless Wednesday - First Gathering

On the Line

I wander about whenever I can, taking photos of things in the natural world that grab my attention: the light in the trees, summer grasses dappled with dew, the creek in the woods singing as it rambles downhill, cedar rail fences, flocks of geese, herons and loons, wild orchids, fallen leaves, mountains and rivers, sunsets and sunrises, full moons and starry nights, winter snowdrifts as high as the Himalayas.

Closer to home, there are the artfully arranged clothes on my neighbor's line (coordinated by colour) and her brightly colored plastic clothespins, sunlight coming through the kitchen window, leaning piles of books, beakers of espresso and mugs of tea, song birds, bumbles and butterflies in the garden, the Beech Mother (and her comely daughters), sweet Beau who lights up my world and my life.

There is (of course) the pesky business of finding words to accompany the images, but I am getting better at letting them speak for themselves. Most of the time, they don't need my clumsy tinkering and feeble attempts at description anyhow. 

The gathering goes on and on like a wild litany, like the pearls of dew on a spider web or the beads on a very long mala. There is always something to see if I have the presence of mind to pay attention to the wonders around me. As Beau and I potter along, I give thanks to the Old Wild Mother (Earth) for all the fine stuff she is dishing out. I have always done that, but these days, my thanks to her have particular urgency in the light of what is happening in the great wide world. 

Why am I mentioning all this stuff this morning? I need a reminder, and this is it.

Sequestered, Week 300 (CCC)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, invisibly, inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Happy Litha!

Friday Ramble - For the Summer Solstice (Litha)

This is the eve of Litha (Midsummer) or the Summer Solstice, and as with all the old festivals, the observance begins tonight at sunset. Tomorrow is the longest day of the calendar year, the Sun poised at its zenith or highest point and seeming to stand still for a fleeting interval before starting down the long slippery slope toward autumn, and beyond that to winter. Actually, it is we who are in motion and not the magnificent star at the center of our universe. Our sun stays right where it is.

This morning's image was taken by the front gate of the Two Hundred Acre Wood in the Lanark highlands some time ago, and it is one of my favorites. It captures the essence of midsummer beautifully with tall trees and hazy sky in the background, golden daisies, purple bugloss and silvery meadow grasses dancing front and center.

It seems as though summer has just arrived, but things are all downhill from here. After tomorrow, days will shorten until Yule (December 21) when they begin to stretch out again. The ebbing is bittersweet, but longer nights go along on the cosmic ride during the last half of the calendar year, and that is something to celebrate for those of us who are moonhearts and ardent backyard astronomers. There are some fine stargazing nights ahead. The Old Wild Mother strews celestial wonders by generous handfuls as the year wanes, spinning luminous tapestries in the velvety darkness that grows deeper and longer with every twenty-four hour interval.

The eight festive spokes on the Wheel of the Year are associated with fire, but the summer solstice more than any other observance. Centuries ago, all Europe was alight on Midsummer eve, and ritual bonfires climbed high into the night from every village green. Long ago festivities included morris dancing, games of chance and storytelling, feasting and pageantry and candlelight processions after dark.

Prosperity and abundance could be ensured by jumping over Midsummer fires, and its embers were charms against injury and bad weather at harvest time. Embers were placed in orchards and fields to ensure a good harvest, and they were carried home to family hearths for protection. Doorways were decorated with swags and wreaths of birch, fennel, white lilies and St. John's Wort which is in bloom now.

My days of jumping midsummer bonfires are over. I will try to be outside with a mug of Jerusalem Artichoke (or Earth Apple) tea and watch the sun rise tomorrow. The afternoon holds a few hours of working in the garden and (as usual) a few mugs of tea and a little reading time on the deck. At nightfall there will be a quiet festive meal, a little stargazing and moon watching later if the skies are clear.

We (Beau and I) cherish the simplicity of our small festive doings, the quiet pleasure of being with loved ones at such times. As always, we will think of my departed soulmate. This is our sixth Litha without Irv, and his passing still cuts like a knife. Some things cannot be tucked away or forgotten. They can only be carried.

Happy Litha (or Midsummer/Summer Solstice), however you choose to celebrate it, or not celebrate it. May the sun light up your day from sunrise to sunset, and your night be filled with stars from here to there. May all good things come to you.

Thursday Poem - Evening

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat

held for it by a row of ancient trees;

you watch: and the lands grow distant

in your sight, one journeying to heaven

and one that falls;

and leave you not at home in either one,

not quite so still and dark as the darkened

houses, not calling to eternity with

the passion of what becomes a star

each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)

your life, with its immensity and fear,

so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,

it is alternately stone in you and star.

Rainer Maria Rilke

(translation by Stephen Mitchell)

Wordless Wednesday - On the Edge

The Old Guy in the Garden

The old guy (Hotei) sits in a sunny alcove in the garden under a canopy of old rose canes and buckthorn boughs. Birds serenade him in early morning, and rabbits visit him at nightfall. Bumbles and dragonflies buzz around him, spiders knit him into their webs, and sometimes butterflies land on him. There is a steady rain of maple keys, leaf dust and pine needles from the trees over his head.

He looks as though he is carved from stone, but he is actually made of some kind of polyresin and weighs only a pound or two. I discovered him in the window of a thrift shop many years ago, purchased him for a few coins and carried him home where he presides over a leafy enclave in the garden from early April until late October.

From October to April, the old guy hangs out in the potting shed, and he is carried there with great pomp and circumstance when the garden is put to bed in late autumn. Our procession to his winter lodgings is a cherished seasonal ritual.

Sequestered, Week 299 (CCXCIX)

Painted Lady in the Garden

 (Vanessa cardui)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world. To make an impression is also to receive one, and the soles of our feet, shaped by the surfaces they press upon, are landscapes themselves with their own worn channels and roving lines. They perhaps most closely resemble the patterns of ridge and swirl revealed when a tide has ebbed over flat sand.

Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Bumble Girl in the Clover

Friday Ramble - Kingfisher Days

Canadian Tiger Swallowtail

(Papilio canadensis)

In summer, I spend hours photographing dragonflies, butterflies, bumbles and bees, puddles and weeds, wild orchids, lupins gone walkabout and doing their own untrammeled thing in roadside ditches. The eastern Ontario highlands are a treasure trove of earthy abundance in all seasons, and I feel fortunate to be there and taking it all in, especially in summer.

Hours are also spent crawling about in the woods on all fours with a macro lens on the camera “doing” ferns, mosses, lichens and little green frogs. Every tump, stump, leafy alcove and stone has wonders to share. Is it difficult to lurch back to a standing position afterward after getting down on the forest floor? Yes, but worth it.

Still other hours are spent hanging out on the shore at the lake, capturing loons floating on the still water as the sun goes down, great herons standing motionless in the shallows, kingfishers hunting the last small meal of the day. Once in a while, an otter paddles by and peers up at me, displaying the bright red inside of its mouth and a set of wicked teeth. There is always something to see.

River otters are making a comeback in the Lanark highlands, and it is common to see them swimming along the lake and in nearby rivers. They are fabulous creatures, and I call them all "Portly", after the wandering otter child in the seventh chapter of Kenneth Graham's incandescent The Wind in the Willows.

These are kingfisher days, times out of time, full of magic and an elusive something I am always reaching toward and can't quite find, let alone capture with camera and lens. When I arrive home, dusty, sweaty and speckled with leaf dust, the day’s images are uploaded and archived. I look at everything first of course, but my efforts make me groan, so I file the DVD away and think no more of it.

Years later, while searching for the right image for something or other, I pull out a DVD and discover it is full of treasures. Imagine that. I have already taken the swallowtail, cicada, loon, fern, wildflower or rain dappled moss shot I am still hoping to find. I discover them all over again, and I remember when they were taken, my soulmate and Beau (or Cassie or Spencer) and I together in the woods on a glorious summer morning, chewed by bugs and as happy as clams.

Apologies to Susan Coyne for borrowing the title of her memoir Kingfisher Days for this morning's post. I have always loved the book.

Thursday Poem - Directions (Excerpt)

The best time is late afternoon

when the sun strobes through

the columns of trees as you are hiking up,

and when you find an agreeable rock

to sit on, you will be able to see

the light pouring down into the woods

and breaking into the shapes and tones

of things and you will hear nothing

but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy

falling of a cone or nut through the trees,

and if this is your day you might even

spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese

driving overhead toward some destination.

But it is hard to speak of these things

how the voices of light enter the body

and begin to recite their stories

how the earth holds us painfully against

its breast made of humus and brambles

how we who will soon be gone regard

the entities that continue to return

greener than ever, spring water flowing

through a meadow and the shadows of clouds

passing over the hills and the ground

where we stand in the tremble of thought

taking the vast outside into ourselves.

Billy Collins, 

(from The Art of Drowning)

Wordless Wednesday - Shining Through

The Jester's Cap and Bells

The delightfully complex shape of columbines always reminds me of a harlequin's chapeau or a medieval court jester's cap. The architecture is splendid stuff, and there is a blithely capering choreography to the columbine's dancing "to and fro" movement on gracefully arching and swaying stems. With sunlight shining through them, the petals and sepals of the flower seem to be made of stained glass.

Their dwelling places are like woodland cathedrals, and the stained glass analogy is apt. The ceilings are up in the sky somewhere, and the nave's soaring green arches disappear into the clouds. The clerestories, ribbed vaults and flying buttresses would make any architect proud, and the leafy chapels seem to go on and on forever.

I am reading John Crowley's fabulous Little, Big for the nth time, and a sentence about the forest at the heart of the book comes to mind: “The further in you go, the bigger it gets.” If you have never read Crowley's novel, make a beeline for your nearest book shop or library and grab a copy. It is one of the most delightful pieces of fiction ever written, and perfect summer reading too.

Columbines often seem to be wearing at least one spider web, along with bits of fluff from nearby cottonwood trees and slender filaments of milkweed silk. I am always astonished and captivated by what my macro lens "sees" and records in its sylvan ramblings. At times, its loving eye seems to linger and caress everything it encounters, and that is particularly so when columbines are in bloom.

As I drifted through the woods on the weekend clicking ecstatically, the first dragonflies of the season whirred around my head and spiraled off into the sunlit trees in search of prey. There were clouds of black flies and mosquitoes, and the little dragons of the air were dining very well indeed.

Another summer of  wildflowers, dragonflies, butterflies and bumbles... There are almost too many wonders for one old hen to take in.

Sequestered, Week 298 (CCXCVIII)

White admiral (Limenitis arthemis)

 

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Cormac McCarthy, from The Road

Seeing Red

Friday Ramble - Aestival

In the science of zoology, aestival refers to the tendency of all living creatures to be sleepy and slow moving in the heat of summer, and botanists also use the word to describe the arrangement of organs or components in a flower bud.

This week's word comes to us from the Late Latin aestīvālis and earlier Latin aestās, both meaning summer or heat. Both forms are cognate with the Sanskrit इन्द्धे (inddhé) meaning to light or set on fire. Way back in our wordy explorations is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root form h₂eydʰ- meaning heat, fire or to burn. The adjective probably came into use during the Middle Ages, some time around 386. 

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of nearly all Indo-European languages and its elements have been assembled from languages known today. There is no record that it ever existed, but if so, it would have been in use from the Late Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age. The prehistoric Proto-Indo-Europeans were most likely nomadic tribes from the steppes of eastern Europe and central Asia, and they were a footloose and fancy free lot. There is evidence that they wandered as far as the Aegean, northern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia, leaving their language, pastoral culture, patriarchal religious beliefs and customs wherever they went.

I once thought that the word siesta (referring to a leisurely nap after lunch) was related, but I discovered a year or two ago that its roots are in the Latin sexta meaning the sixth hour of the day (midday). The two words sound similar, but as far as I know, they are not related.

This week's word is my favorite adjective for the (all too brief) greening season at the heart of the calendar year. Summery is a fine word too, but it doesn't hold a candle or even a tiny wooden match to the frothy perfumed magnificence of the golden season that reigns so gloriously and so briefly here in the sub-Arctic climes of Canada. Aestival says it all, and I love the shape of the word on my tongue.

I say "aestival" and its sibilance summons up images of alfresco celebrations and farmers' markets, shaggy gardens of scarlet poppies and towering purple lupins, trees filled with singing birds, bees in the orchard, roses sweeter than any vineyard potion, perfect sunsets across the lake shared with herons and loons. The season is filled with light, and every moment should be savoured.

Thursday Poem - To the Rain

Mother rain, manifold, measureless,

falling on fallow, on field and forest,

on house-roof, low hovel, high tower,

downwelling waters all-washing, wider

than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster

than countrysides, calming, recalling:

return to us, teaching our troubled

souls in your ceaseless descent

to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root,

to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the seas.

Ursula K. Le Guin, from So Far So Good

Wordless Wednesday - Lupins and Early Light

Let There Be Red

June would not be June without clay pots and cauldrons and planters of red geraniums (cranesbills) blooming on the thresholds of houses in the village, and today is the third day of the quintessential summer month. How can it be? The season has just arrived, but the midsummer solstice is only three weeks away.

Beau and I have noticed on early morning walks that many of this year's geranium offerings are accompanied by purple petunias and marigolds. There are also some splendid coleuses in rainbow shades, and sometimes all four dwell comfortably in the same pot, geraniums, petunias, marigold and coleus. What a riot of aestival color!

My gypsy soul craves coleus strains like "Dragon Heart, "Rainbow Dragon", "Kingswood Torch" and "Chocolate Covered Cherry", and I am looking for other places in the garden to plant them this year. Ditto some of the arty amaranth varieties in local nurseries like "Joseph's Coat", "Molten Fire" and "Early Splendor". Whatever I add this time around, it has to be something the little bee sisters and the hummers will love.

A pot of geraniums on the threshold of the little blue house is a long standing summer tradition. Every year, I remember the specimens that graced the threshold in past years, welcoming everyone who came to the red (Benjamin Moore 2080-10 Raspberry Truffle) front door. I remember their shape, their color, their texture, their green and rather peppery fragrance, their jubilant, unfettered flowering.

May there be geraniums at your door too. May there be blooming in your life.

Sequestered, Week 297 (CCXCVII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

There is no mystery in this association of woods and other worlds, for as anyone who has walked the woods knows, they are places of correspondence, of call and answer. Visual affinities of color, relief and texture abound. A fallen branch echoes the deltoid form of a stream bed into which it has come to rest. Chrome yellow autumn elm leaves find their color rhyme in the eye-ring of the blackbird. Different aspects of the forest link unexpectedly with each other, and so it is that within the stories, different times and worlds can be joined.

Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

The Purple Eyes of Heaven

Bearded Iris (Iris germanica vulgaris)

This morning's sumptuous blooms are named for the goddess of the rainbow, Iris, messenger of the gods on Mount Olympus. She was charged with carrying their messages along the rainbow bridge between heaven and earth.

Iris also escorted the souls of virtuous dead women to their final resting places in the Elysian fields. In Greece, irises were planted on graves by grieving family members, that the goddess might recognize and guide their departed loved ones home.

Purple is one of my favourite colours, and when bearded irises bloom, they make my heart glad. That is surely what gardens and flowers are all about. A rainbow is a happy thing, and the flower's association with it seems appropriate.

Typing this, I remembered a silky, deep purple ribbon I wore in my hair as a child. The adults in my family thought the colour was not appropriate for someone so young, but I wore it anyway. It seems my love of purple goes back a very long way.

Friday Ramble - Sweet

And so it goes . . . One day, the old crabapple is bare and forlorn, the next day it wears a multitude of tiny leaves. Almost overnight, the tree is covered with blooms and buzzing with throngs of ecstatic, blissed-out bumbles, bees and wasps.

Along comes an early summer breeze, and the crabapple symphony is over, petals drifting through the air like confetti, coming to rest on lawns and hedges and gardens, on fences and birdbaths and pergolas and fountains. The fallen bits of pink float merrily on puddles in the street and flutter across cobblestones in the village like tiny, airborne scraps of vibrantly hued carnival paper. Their presence conveys a festive aspect to the day, and seeing them on our morning walks makes us smile.

Our word traces its roots all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root form *swād- meaning sweet or pleasant, also the likely source of Old English, Germanic, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin words meaning the same thing.

Lilacs in the village are blooming, and when I stepped outside with Beau last evening around ten, the night air was full of their heady fragrance. For a few minutes, we leaned against the railing on the veranda and breathed in the glorious perfume. Then we were driven indoors by clouds of ravenous mosquitoes. The little blighters were out for blood and no mistake.

Standing out in the darkness, I remembered a long ago garden I planted with purple heliotrope. The color of the blooms was gorgeous, and their sweet, cherry-like scent pulled in hummingbirds, butterflies, bumbles and bees from miles around. The stuff was almost indecently sumptuous, and I shall have to plant it again.

How sweet this season is, how fleeting and poignant, just a little sad too. I sometimes wish that summer lasted a little longer this far north, but if it did, spring and autumn would be truncated slightly. No to that!

Thursday Poem - The Other Kingdoms

Consider the other kingdoms. The
trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding
titles: oak, aspen, willow.
Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north
have dozens of words to describe its
different arrivals. Or the creatures, with their
thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Their
infallible sense of what their lives
are meant to be. Thus the world
grows rich, grows wild, and you too,
grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too

were born to be.

Mary Oliver

Wordless Wednesday - Raining, Greenly